Perverse Sentimentalism Part 3: How We Might Get Rent Control

You’ll hear a lot of people hand wave the notion that Seattle will get rent control anytime soon. Even the legislative proponent, Representative Nicole Macri, says she thinks it will be a struggle. But here’s how it might play out. My job is to worry about the worst case scenario. Here’s the worst scenario I […]

Perverse Sentimentalism Part 2: Rent Control Effort On the Move

I wrote about how the Seattle Weekly reported the story of a candidate for the City Council of Issaquah being “priced out” of his own community; a candidate and a city council that believes that building more housing makes it more expensive. The story of rent control is essentially the same, a movement that supports a policy […]

Issaquah Councilman: Twisted Irony or Perverse Sentimentalism?

When I was a young philosophy student we spent many hours debating ethics and morality and learning the difference. One element of the pedagogy was the hypothetical scenario as a way to explore whether human beings can behave in ways that are moral and what that even means. One key discussion was always around altruism, […]